Serif’s graphic design app Affinity Designer for Mac has released its latest version – and to celebrate the launch they’re offering a limited-time discount to new users as well as a free Grade UI kit.

Affinity Designer 1.5 is now available in the App Store for a one-off payment of £29.99. If you’re working on branding, concept art, print projects, icons, UI, UX or web mock-ups then this software offers a decent alternative to Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Photoshop Sketch - it won the Apple Design Award last year.

New features include optimisation for MacOS Sierra, text styles and symbols, a new colour picker tool, constraints, export improvements, asset management and style improvements.

Affinity Designer 1.5: New features

The new constraints feature allows users to control the position or size of an object relative to its container, making it possible to create reusable elements performing in a pseudo-responsive manner.

The symbols feature allows users to have multiple instances of the same object – where editing one object will edit them all simultaneously.

Snapping power is a new feature based around creating easy, customisable alignment through grids and snap to pixel, while instant live feedback makes it a doodle to monitor the precision of your design.

The asset management panel allows users to drag and drop items into or out of the panel for easy access.

To find out more information on the new features in Affinity Designer 1.5 check out these videos.

Affinity Designer 1.5: Price & deals

Along with the launch of Affinity Designer 1.5, Serif is offering new customers a limited-time 20 percent discount on the usual one-off price of £39.99 (US$49.99). It’ll now cost you £29.99 to buy the software for the first time, and upgrading to the latest version is free to existing owners. There’s also a free trial available.

And they’re also throwing in a free Grade UI web design kit worth US$58 to all Affinity Designer owners. The kit is created by Russian designer Sergey Azovskiy, with the aim to make it as versatile as possible for designers and developers to create a site within minutes.

Mac and Windows users should follow the prompts in-app to download the kit.

Serif also offers Mac photo editing software Affinity Photo – a strong rival to Adobe Photoshop. Check out what we thought of it after its release last year. This is in beta version for Windows users and is expected to be released for PC soon.

Affinity Designer Workbook

The Affinity Designer workbook, released October 19, holds more than 400 pages of instructions, guides and tips on the software, helping you get the most out of your experience.

Readers are given step-by-step guides of nine projects created especially for the book by illustrators and designers, including UX designer and illustrator from Italy Paolo Limoncelli.

His contribution, The Whittler, teaches users how to use raster and vector techniques, as well as creating brushes in Affinity Designer.

Readers can get their hands on helpful tear-out cheat sheets that display the keyboard shortcuts designed for use in the different modes within the app.

The workbook also includes four design projects for readers to follow, covering logo design, designing for print, UI and apps.